The Power of Personas

By Cathleen Zapata

Why create a Web site, or create anything for that matter, if you don’t take into account who your users are? After all, isn’t the end goal for people to not only like, but to use what you’ve designed?

Personas are a great way to bring your actual users to life so you can keep them in mind as you design. Amazingly to me, the real end user is quite often forgotten during the design process. I’ve seen designs that are slick – fancy – extraordinary – unique – but some of these same designs have been completely unusable by the end user. No one wants to waste time and effort, and creating personas is one way to eliminate the problem of creating a site that doesn’t work for your audience.

What are personas?

A persona is a description of a specific person – your target user – of who you’re designing for. Personas identify “typical users” of your Web site or design that represent a mass audience.

What can personas do for me?

Personas create direction and vision during the design process, allowing you to identify features and functionality based on your user’s goals and skill level. Personas bring your users to life. They are given names, personalities and a photo. They can be displayed on paper, posters or even life-size cut-outs. You can have them in front of you as you design, take them to meetings with you, or post/position them somewhere where your organization can see them (and remember them!) in plain view.

Personas contain information about your target users that you need to remember and consider – demographic information, user needs, preferences, biographical info, etc. You know your personas are working when people start asking, “Would Jamie like that feature?” and, “Would this content be something Mary would be interested in reading?”

Let’s take a look at one…

Below is a summary of a persona for Design Dump based on log data and information collected from real users. A persona doesn’t actually represent one real person, but it should be based on information you have about your real users. This information must first be collected before your personas can be created. It’s important that your personas represent your real end users, and not created based on your opinion of who your end users are.

Katie is a graphic designer, currently working for a small advertising firm on the west side of Cleveland. She’s 28 years old and just married last year. She and her husband, Greg, just bought their first home a few months ago. She’s extremely busy juggling multiple clients, adjusting to her new married life and fixing up her new home. Because she’s so busy, she doesn’t have much time to stay up to date with the latest news online related to her field. She doesn’t have any time to read the handful of Design magazines she gets each month either. However, it’s important that she stays up to date with what’s going on, especially since she works so closely with the various clients at her firm. She visits Design Dump because it’s one site that contains a multitude of the information she needs to stay current on, such as upcoming conferences, competitions and web stats. She also uses the site’s Web Resizing Tool when designing to view pages in 800x600 since her screen resolution on the Mac she uses at work is always set to a much higher resolution.

The graphic designer persona is an important one for Design Dump. “Katie” represents the great majority of visitors to the site that are professional graphic designers. The majority of the graphic designers visiting the site are women within the 25-35 year old age range. The individuals in this “group” are at the age where they’re starting their family and growing in their career. They are very busy people, yet hungry for information. Sixty five percent of the audience lives in the U.S. These visitors are using high tech computers and mainly Macs.

Personas will bring value to your design project to help ensure that you’re designing to your user’s wants and needs. It will allow you to list out your site’s objectives and goals so you can then ask yourself, “Will Katie want this?”

Only by understanding your visitors and their needs will you be able to bring the most value – and success – to your site.

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